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Louisiana

I began my career in West Africa in the 1990s, where Nigerians who peacefully protested the oil industry’s destruction of their farms were raped, beaten and murdered. In the Niger Delta, violent repression was the oil industry and the Nigerian government’s response to a movement that had grown so powerful that on one day, in one protest, there were 300,000 people in the streets.

I’m Darin Acosta. I grew up in Norco, Louisiana. That’s influenced a lot of work and research that I do. Most of my creative output centers around industrialization in the River Parishes. I went to graduate school for urban and regional planning at UNO (University of New Orleans), where I learned GIS (geographic information system), so I apply GIS to my creative work in order to introduce users to environmental justice histories in the region that I grew up in.

This is part two of a three part series featuring an insider look at the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico - including environmental practices, worker-related injuries and deaths, and the industry’s economic and political influence - through the lens of thirty-five-year oil worker Randy Comeaux. See part one here.

This is part one of a three part series featuring an insider look at the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico - including environmental practices, worker-related injuries and deaths, and the industry’s economic and political influence - through the lens of thirty-five-year oil worker Randy Comeaux.

“What is being proposed is dumping a problem from one neighborhood to another without actually solving the issue,” says Graham Bosworth of a proposal to move and expand hazardous rail traffic out of Old Metarie and into his Hollygrove Dixon community in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Approximately 300 people filled the Castine Center in Mandeville, Louisiana on Monday, May 12th. The crowd was electric. The majority of them held signs with slogans such as “We can’t drink your excuses,” and “Frack-Free St. Tammany.”

On April 24th, parents, students, and community advocates from across Louisiana rallied at the State Capitol in opposition to Senate Bill 652. The draconian bill would further criminalize our children in a number of alarming ways that are more about expanding the “school to prison pipeline" than promoting safety.

Today rusted out swings gently sway in the wind on the playground of the Old Settlement School in Golden Meadow, Louisiana... Although the segregated Indian school has been closed for nearly five decades, the sense of community has not been forgotten on the property, which is now the Main Office of the United Houma Nation.